The Bay of Foxes by Sheila Kohler Read Free Book Online Page A

thought they had forgotten him there, left him alone to rot like carrion.
    Then he realizes she is standing beside his bed. She has switched on the small candle-shaped lamp on the top of the upright piano to watch him sleep. It is hot in the airless room in the June night, though he had opened his window before he went to sleep and thrown the sheet back. Now he pulls up the sheet to his chin to cover his nakedness. He does not possess pajamas. He sits up, shaking.
    “Don’t be frightened. I’m just looking at you,” she says, smiling, reaching over, and putting her hand on his arm.
    “I wasn’t frightened, just surprised,” he feels obliged to say, though he is still trembling. Her face is pale without her makeup, and she is wearing a diaphanous black nightgown, her white hair loose around her face and shoulders, her slack breasts almost visible. She says extravagantly, “You are sobeautiful, I would like to kill you. I will give you money, if you will make love to me.”
    He looks back at her, and she reaches out to stroke his cheek. He shakes his head, crosses his arms, and says, “I can’t—that’s all I can say. I just can’t. If I forced myself, it would not be good for either of us. It might even be dangerous.”
    But she looks so sad, standing beside the bed on the small red carpet, and she is not asking for anything now, her shoulders slumped, her forehead down. He understands her despair. He understands desire. He says, “Turn off the light.” She turns to do it. Then he hears her come back and sit down on the floor, close beside him in the darkness.
    Naked, he gets out of his bed and squats beside her. In the narrow dark space, the two of them pressed together like children playing hide-and-seek, he reaches out for her. He feels for her face and shoulders. He lifts her black nightgown over her head. He thinks of the tall young lover, the elegant landlord, the one with the fancy car, the linen suit, the glittering rings, the one she lost long ago, or the one she imagined she lost, who picked her up on the ferry and took her back to the hotel room with its sounds of the street and the night. He wonders if there was ever a man who even vaguely resembled the handsome one she described so vividly, so entrancingly, in her book.
    He lets his hands run down her long neck. She puts her hands on his shoulders and runs them down his smooth bare chest, while he touches her small, slack breasts, sunken stomach, bony hips. Her fingers are groping for his flaccid sex. Blindly he forces himself to move his hands over her body, the voice like a Greek chorus on a stage recording his actions.
Hetouches her legs; he runs his hands all the way down to the soles of her feet.
She moans softly in the heat of the summer night. He slips down, lying stretched out on the floor. He pulls her back. She is stretched out beside him in the narrow space. He feels between her thin legs. He touches her damp sex with horror.
    He turns her body over quickly, unable to bear the rise and fall of her flesh, her dampness, her smell. He plants her down with a rough shove and a smack, pushes her face into the carpet cruelly. She groans. He feels the wings of her shoulder blades, straddles her body, and tries to enter her from behind.
    “It’s impossible,” he says, getting up, turning on the light, standing over her. She goes on lying there before him, so thin and white, her hair on her shoulders, not moving, as if she were dead. She makes him think of the witch in the folktales his mother would tell him. When she turns onto her back and shields her eyes with her hands, she asks, “You could never desire me?”
    He sits down on the edge of the bed, takes her hand, lifts her up, and makes her sit beside him. He says, “I think you are very beautiful.”
    She looks at him so sadly, tears shining in her eyes.
    He recalls the moment when she told him about her lost lover. “That first day in the café, I wanted you, I really did. I remembered